These experts on AI are here to help us understand important things about AI.
Who are these generous, helpful experts that the CBC found, you ask?
“Dr. Muhammad Mamdani, vice-president of data science and advanced analytics at Unity Health Toronto”, per LinkedIn a PharmD, who also serves in various AI-associated centres and institutes.
“(Jeff) Macpherson is a director and co-founder at Xagency.AI”, a tech startup which does, uh, lots of stuff with AI (see their wild services page) that appears to have been announced on LinkedIn two months ago. The founders section lists other details apart from J.M.'s “over 7 years in the tech sector” which are interesting to read in light of J.M.'s own LinkedIn page.
Other people making points in this article:
C. L. Polk, award-winning author (of Witchmark).
“Illustrator Martin Deschatelets” whose employment prospects are dimming this year (and who knows a bunch of people in this situation), who per LinkedIn has worked on some nifty things.
“Ottawa economist Armine Yalnizyan”, per LinkedIn a fellow at the Atkinson Foundation who used to work at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Could the CBC actually seriously not find anybody willing to discuss the actual technology and how it gets its results? This is archetypal hood-welded-shut sort of stuff.
Things I picked out, from article and round table (before the video stopped playing):
Does that Unity Health doctor go back later and check these emergency room intake predictions against actual cases appearing there?
Who is the “we” who have to adapt here?
AI is apparently “something that can tell you how many cows are in the world” (J.M.). Detecting a lack of results validation here again.
“At the end of the day that’s what it’s all for. The efficiency, the productivity, to put profit in all of our pockets”, from J.M.
“You now have the opportunity to become a Prompt Engineer”, from J.M. to the author and illustrator. (It’s worth watching the video to listen to this person.)
Me about the article:
I’m feeling that same underwhelming “is this it” bewilderment again.
Me about the video:
Critical thinking and ethics and “how software products work in practice” classes for everybody in this industry please.
Yes, with the difference that crypto was never realistically going to replace normal currency. There’s a real risk that LLM-generated content kills the open web, though. Both by flooding the zone with generated shit, and by destroying the motivation of humans to add to the inputs.
do you have a rough outline of the steps you see toward the killing of the open web? Do you mean the effect of not realistically being able to stop the scraping of content?
Basically, the incentives to publishing on the open web will go away.
Because all open search results will be LLM-generated, output on the open web will drown in it, and people will flee to silos that can do a better job at keeping that crap out (similar to the tip to add “reddit” to google search queries to avoid the increasingly SEO’d search results). Said silos will either charge money for LLM-ingesters, or forbid them altogether. People will post to silos, either because that’s where the content is, or because the silo will claim their input is safe from LLM harvesting[1].
[1] outside nerd circles I don’t think this is a big selling point